Money over time

Wealth can only come from income.
And income can only come by one of the following means:
1. Working
2. Investing
3. Hoping

Working will give income according to how hard and how cleverly you work. Investing gives income according to the amount you put away and your knowledge, ability and the risk that you take. Hoping also apparently gives income (from inheritances or other windfalls) but is not to be depended upon. 

You are no doubt already doing the best you can (taking account of lifestlye considerations) from working. You may also be getting some money from your investments. Within obvious constraints, then, you have maximised your income.

The important thing then is what you do with that income.

Clearly your first priority will be to clear any debts that you have. After that, you will start to invest.

Because of the time value of money and the compounding effect, neither of the above will happen quickly at the start. The growth in your net worth is very gradual. But as you start to gain momentum - as you start to receive interest on last year's interest and then interest on last year's interest as well as on the interest from the year before that - your wealth will start to grow quickly. 
 
This rate of increase is roughly the same if you have gone into an investment/ savings scheme or accelerated your debt repayment schedule. It is slow to work at first, but when it starts to take off it REALLY takes off.
Eventually, wealth creates wealth.

So be patient at the beginning.
One of the ways to increase net income is of course to reduce personal expenditure. However, unlike some other writers, I am doubtful about this. The first of my doubts is simply to cut out, say, going out for a meal is a killjoy approach. After all, life is for living. Second, however, is that such expenditure reductions are like dieting and seldom seem to work for long. Expenditure has a habit of finding a level and staying there almost regardless of the conscious efforts made to reduce it.

Very few people successfully live within a budget.
The only way that I know to properly tackle this is to set your budget by establishing automatic payments for your increased mortgage repayments or savings/investments plan and then live on what's left.

However, this still needs to be a reasonable amount or you will find living getting more and more difficult each month. Payments made automatically are seldom missed. They become part of your life's reality, part of the financial framework within which you must live.

Be careful though. If you set that framework too tightly you may find life difficult to enjoy. Not only that, but after a few months (at most!) finances will become so tight that you will need to break your existing arrangement, be it an increased debt repayment or an investment plan. And once you have broken it, just like eating a packet of biscuits on your diet, it is very hard to start again. So much of growing wealth is about attitude - if you fail with a set of arrangements you will find that you become discouraged and not keen to try again. 

Again, like dieting, as soon as the budget is broken you are likely to binge and end up in an even worse financial situation than before.

Set your budgets to ensure both that you enjoy life, and that they are comfortably met. I am no great fan of advisers who say that you should set aside 10% (or some other percentage) of your income as savings and then try to live on the rest. Such an amount is arbitrary - it may suit a few people but not all. A budget like this needs to be set on an individual basis, not with standard set amounts or percentages, supposedly to suit everyone.

In my view the setting of budgets which are simply too hard to keep to and which are broken and broken again is the worst thing which can happen. I think people are better to work out more modest arrangements, be successful with those and then increase their provision for the future as they feel able to do so, further down the track. A strategy which is adopted for a long period of time and which is consistent again sustainable will always beat a stop-start, on again-off  again approach.